Where Nobody Knows You're a Music Thief
susurrus
October 5, 2003
By DANIEL AKST
IMAGINE that you sell newspapers on the honor system. You put some papers
out on a table, along with a can for the money. It would surprise hardly
anyone if, at the end of the day, more papers were taken than were paid for.
But Dan Ariely, a professor of media and management at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology who has studied people's online behavior, says that
when experimenters who actually tried this mounted a mirror above the
newspapers, more people left money when they took a paper. Apparently, many
of us can be shamed into honesty.
That's the trouble with the Internet. If it's a place where nobody knows
you're a dog, as a New Yorker cartoon once said, then it's also a place
where nobody knows you're a crook, either. Even you may not know. Anonymity
allows honest people to sustain a higher level of dishonesty without guilt,
as is obvious to many people who have tried online dating.
Nothing captures this phenomenon better than Internet music sharing. What's
remarkable about the controversy over music sharing is not how many people
are involved - although the number is certainly large - but rather their
fervent rationalizing. Internet music sharers, and their defenders, have
variously argued that the music industry is evil, that CD's are too
expensive and that record companies have brought this upon themselves by
failing to offer their wares online.
Even stranger than these tortured justifications is the willingness of
parents and others in polite society to acquiesce. After all, Internet music
sharing is "pretty clearly a copyright violation," says Joseph P. Liu, an
assistant professor at Boston College Law School and an intellectual
property specialist. It does not matter if the music business is tasteless,
oligopolistic or foolish, as some of its critics contend. Even the greedy
and the oafish enjoy the protection of the law.
How is it that otherwise law-abiding citizens do not seem to mind? One
reason, Professor Ariely says, is self-deception: "People tell themselves
stories they like to hear to justify what they're doing, so they can get
something for nothing." That's why the mirror was so effective in the
experiment; it impaired the self-deception of those who would steal a
newspaper. Moreover, he says, people's willingness to pay is strongly tied
to their sense of fairness about price. Consumers know that the cost of
producing a CD is low, and because the music shared online is incorporeal,
why should anyone mind if they don't pay?
The reason we should all mind is that Internet music sharing represents a
profound assault on the very idea of intellectual property. Today it's
music, but tomorrow it will be movies and then books, and the justifications
will be the same. The implications should be obvious to producers of
intellectual property, but the outcry has been muffled in part because
universities have come to own and operate so much of the nation's
intellectual life.
Many academic intellectuals, who do not seem to like business much anyway,
derive relatively little income directly from their writings. Instead, they
hope to profit from their intellectual output by attaining tenure and
renown. If you live on an academic paycheck - instead of royalties - then
the free electronic distribution of your scholarly works is probably
preferable to having a university press print 500 copies bound directly for
the deepest library stacks.
The absurd Robin Hood narrative that has sprung up around music sharing only
obscures what is happening: that a large group of mainly middle-class
individuals are not just breaking the law, but also attacking the legal
concept that is essential to freedom and prosperity in the information age.
Mirror, mirror on the wall, what's the fairest thing of all? The answer is
probably authentication. Sooner or later we will need to know who everyone
on the Internet is, and who confirmed their identities. Internet access
providers who admit unauthenticated users will have to be shut out, even if
that means shutting out whole countries.
In such a world, there would be no doubt about who was violating copyright
laws or otherwise misusing the electronic commons. It's sad, I know. The
ability to shed one's identity online seemed a dream for a while, but as the
poet Delmore Schwartz reminds us, "in dreams begin responsibilities."
Copyright New York Times
By Permission
Andre Storfer
both published AND perished.
AES
"susurrus" <susu...@mindspring.com> wrote in message news:ZpXfb.2536
$Qy2....@newsread4.news.pas.earthlink.net...
Richard Loeb
"susurrus" <susu...@mindspring.com> wrote in message
news:ZpXfb.2536$Qy2....@newsread4.news.pas.earthlink.net...
>
>
Andre Storfer
You took enough interest to publish a reply.
AES
"Richard Loeb" <loe...@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:dQqdnb1lv8t...@comcast.com...
GRNDPADAVE
>Date: 10/05/2003 11:41 AM Central Daylight Time
>Message-id: <4RXfb.683358$YN5.540638@sccrnsc01>
>
>"Yawn...............?"
>You took enough interest to publish a reply.
>AES
Unlike Hallmark, while he may have cared enough, he hardly supplied his very
best.
:>)) G/P Dave
Ancona21
both published AND perished.
AES >>
I have done both; the first literally, the second figuratively.
Ancona
donpaolo
compare lists privately.....
DonP.
"Andre Storfer" <and...@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:xMXfb.686334$Ho3.146254@sccrnsc03...
Mcubed
news:ZpXfb.2536$Qy2....@newsread4.news.pas.earthlink.net:
>
> ... Internet music sharing
> represents a profound assault on the very idea of intellectual
> property.
Absolutely! That's what's so wonderful about filesharing. It has
finally made a great many people sit up and take notice that "the very
idea of intellectual property" is a sham.
The great lie that the copyright cartels continue to spout like a mantra
is that the purpose of copyright is to ensure the rights of artists to
their work. They are (purposefully) confusing the means with the end.
The purpose of copyright is self-evident in Article 1, Sec. 8 of the U.S.
Constitution: "To promote the sciences and useful arts..." This article
was included in the Constitution over the strenuous objections of Thomas
Jefferson, who famously and eloquently noted that ideas could not be
owned. The term "intellectual property" would be incomprehensible to
him. James Madison convinced Jefferson that copyright was necessary by
pointing to the disastrous example of France after the Revolution.
Copyright was abolished in France, for about 20 years, and no publisher
would release any work in France during that time. (Copyright in France
had previously been a form of state censorship -- indeed, the origins of
copyright go back to mid-millennium England, when the Crown instituted a
screening process for anyone who wanted to publish. Such approval, once
granted, was called a copyright; needless to say, those who would be
critical of the Crown would not get one.) Madison views were summed up
nicely in Justice Breyer's Eldred vs. Ashcroft dissent:
Madison, like Jefferson and others in the founding generation,
warned against the dangers of monopolies. (“What was it drove our
forefathers to this country? Was it not the ecclesiastical
corporations and perpetual monopolies of England and Scotland?”).
Madison noted that the Constitution had “limited them to two cases,
the authors of Books, and of useful inventions.” He thought that in
those two cases monopoly is justified because it amounts to
“compensation for” an actual community “benefit” and because the
monopoly is “temporary”—the term originally being 14 years (once
renewable). Madison concluded that “under that limitation a sufficient
recompence and encouragement may be given.” But he warned in general
that monopolies must be “guarded with strictness agst abuse.”
[references removed for easy of reading, but you can find all the
opinions in the case here:
http://www.thinkinglinks.info/converted_legal_docs/eldred/eldred_TOC.html
As Justice Breyer notes, "The Constitution itself describes the basic
Clause objective as one of 'promot[ing] the Progress of Science,' i.e.,
knowledge and learning. The Clause exists not to 'provide a special
private benefit,' but 'to stimulate artistic creativity for the general
public good,' It does so by 'motivat[ing] the creative activity of
authors' through 'the provision of a special reward.' The 'reward' is a
means, not an end. And that is why the copyright term is limited. It is
limited so that its beneficiaries—the public—'will not be permanently
deprived of the fruits of an artist’s labors.'
What millions of people realize that neither the law nor Mr. Akst has
caught onto yet is that the public is being deprived of the fruits of an
artist's labors for far too long -- in the U.S. from the perspective any
individual, it is extremely unlikely that anything more than a smidgen of
material published or recorded during one's own lifetime will actually
enter the public domain. This is not the way to ensure a relevant public
domain, it is only a way to guarantee that profits from monopolies that
were supposed to be limited will continue to flow to the handful of
international conglomerates that control them. In effect, after 200
years, the U.S. has traded ecclesiastical monopolies for corporate ones.
But it will all come out in the wash -- unenforceable, unjust, routinely
ignored laws eventually unravel, sometimes violently, sometimes with a
minimum of fuss. Millions of people realized that slavery and
segregation were wrong long before lawmakers caught up to them. And more
and more people discovering the possibilities the Internet brings -- the
flowering and spread of culture unimaginable to the Ancient Greek
storytellers who travelled on foot from village to village spreading
tales of the gods -- are realizing that the 20th-century invention of
lawyers known as "intellectual property" is wrong as well.
--
Michael M.
New York, NY USA
-email addy is valid-
Capa0848
>From: anco...@aol.com (Ancona21)
>Date: 10/5/2003 10:26 AM Pacific Standard Time
>Message-id: <20031005132611...@mb-m13.aol.com>
No matter; writing is a great and honorable calling that produces men and women
capable of brilliant expressiveness and discerning judgment.
From the days of Dante and Petrarch down to the modern works of Moravia and
Innaurato, writers have ...
Hmm, let me get back to you on this.
Pat
Ancona21
<< From the days of Dante and Petrarch down to the modern works of Moravia and
Innaurato, writers have ...
Hmm, let me get back to you on this. >>
Ouch.
Ancona
Oisk17
> Not to name names, but it might be good news if some of rmo's
>academics
>> both published AND perished.
>> AES
And on the very day I read this post - my newest book (A science review book)
was published...
I KNOW you don't mean me, Andy, my friend...
Regards,
Paul
Andre Storfer
Congratulations on becoming part of The Academic Establishment.
AES
"Oisk17" <ois...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:20031010133834...@mb-m24.aol.com...
Capa0848
>Date: 10/10/2003 10:38 AM Pacific Standard Time
>Message-id: <20031010133834...@mb-m24.aol.com>
>
>>"Andre Storfer" <and...@comcast.net> wrote in message
>
>> Not to name names, but it might be good news if some of rmo's
>>academics
>>> both published AND perished.
>>> AES
>
>And on the very day I read this post - my newest book (A science review book)
>was published...
>
>Paul
What a Cohencidence!
My newest book was published quite recently, too.
There is one minor difference though.
In my case, I bought it, not wrote it.
Congratulations, Paul -- hope you sell a million!
Pat